There is, however, one point with reference to this analogy on which a few words must here be said. If there is any truth at all in the theory of evolution with reference to the human mind, we may be quite sure, from what has been said in earlier chapters, that tone, gesture, and grimace preceded articulation as the medium of pre-conceptual utterance. Therefore, the structural similarity between existing gesture-language and the earliest records of articulate language now under consideration, is presumably due, not only to a similarity of psychological conditions, but also to direct continuity of descent. Or, as Colonel Mallery well puts it, while speaking of the presumable origin of spoken language, “as the action was then the essential, and the consequent or concomitant sound the accident, it would be expected that a representation, or feigned reproduction of the action, would have been used to express the idea before the sound associated with that action could have been separated from it. The visual onomatopœia of gestures, which even yet have been subjected to but slight artificial corruption, would therefore serve as a key to the audible. It is also contended that in the pristine days, when the sounds of the only words yet formed had close connection with objects and the ideas directly derived from them, signs were as much more copious for communication than speech as the sight embraces more and more distinct characteristics of objects than does the sense of hearing.”[273] * * * * * All the foregoing and general conclusions thus reached, touching the genesis of conceptual from pre-conceptual ideation, admit of being strikingly corroborated through another line of philological research. On antecedent grounds the evolutionist would suppose that “the first language-signs must have denoted those physical acts and qualities which were directly apprehensible by the senses; both because these alone are directly significable, and because it was only they that untrained human beings had the power to deal with or the occasion to use.”[274] In other words, if, as we suppose, language had its origin in merely denotative sign-making, which gradually became more and more connotative and thus gradually more and more predicative; obviously the original denotations must have referred only to objects (or actions, states, and qualities) of merely receptual significance—_i.e._ “those physical acts and qualities which are directly apprehensible by the senses.” And, no less obviously, the connotative extension of such denotative names must, for an enormously long period, have been confined to a pre-conceptual cognizance of the most obvious analogies—_i.e._ such analogies as would necessarily thrust themselves upon the merely sensuous perception by the force of direct association.